Sunseeker Orion X7 review: Great robot mower, subpar app

Price When Reviewed

$2399.99

Best Prices Today: Orion X7

The first thing I noticed about the Orion X7 is its size. It’s quite small for an all-wheel drive (AWD) model, boasting a much lower profile than other mowers. Those factors render it much sleeker, with a less-noticeable presence in your yard).

The Orion X7 uses a combination of geopositioning technologies, including Real-time Kinematic (RTK) and Virtual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM). Sunseeker brands the tech as its AONavi Positioning and Navigation System. While these are the same technologies used in some other mowers, including the Segway Navimow, Sunseeker says its implementation enables the Orion X7 to be positioned down to the centimeter.

Twin front-mounted cameras and onboard AI learn your yard over time, remembering obstacles and optimizing the map each time it runs. Features such as virtual boundaries and walls keep your mower out of areas where it might get stuck or damaged. All-wheel drive (AWD), a must for sloped yards, is standard.

Dual floating cutting plates (a first among the mowers I’ve tested to date) offer a 14-inch cutting width and deliver even cuts on uneven lawns. But the best thing about the Orion X7 is its price: at $2,399 for the .75-acre model I tested, and $2,999 for the 1.5-acre model. That makes these some of the least-expensive AWD robot mowers on the market.

Installation and setup

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Installation is quick, and the quick-start guide is easy to follow to get everything assembled. Unlike the Segway Navimow, we got a solid GPS signal from installing the antenna at ground level, allowing us to place it and the base station close to each other.

Like most mowers, the Orion X7 comes with enough charge to get you through setup, but we recommend you wait the additional 30 minutes or so to get a full charge (a typical charge from a depleted battery takes 60- to 90 minutes).

After a great installation experience, we expected an equally good setup experience; however, that wasn’t the case. With boundary wire-free mowers, you must—in most cases—define the boundaries of your yard. This requires remote control of the mower.

For whatever reason, Sunseeker puts all the controls in one virtual joystick on your phone, controlling movement in all directions. The sensitivity of the controls is great, but trying to get the mower to move in a straight line was nearly impossible, as any small movement of my finger caused the Orion X7 to move ever so slightly off that straight line. Frustrating.

I find the Segway Navimow’s dual-controller design (one for forward and backward, the other for left and right) much easier to control. While Sunseeker says you’ll have this part of the setup done in 30 minutes, even on my quarter-acre property, it took almost an hour to figure out how to get the mower to move where it should.

Using the Orion X7

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

After my initial setup experience, I was worried that the operation of the Orion X7 would be just as janky. How would this thing mow if I couldn’t get the mower to go where I wanted to? Thankfully, I was wrong. Once I got the mower running, I was extremely impressed with its capabilities, especially at night.

While AI is a big deal in robot mowers, my experience with it hasn’t been the best. Segway, for instance, says its mower will learn your yard over time, but the Navimow time and time again would get stuck in the same places, or fall off the curb because it would try to turn on the edge rather than in the grass.

The Orion X7’s AI works impressively well. My yard has a small hole where excess water drains from the roof’s gutters, and it’s been a common spot where the mowers I’ve tested have gotten stuck. It wasn’t a problem with Orion X7; even in the dark, it knew something was there, so it would stop and then go around it. And in successive passes, it knew to avoid that spot.

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

My yard is also quite uneven, a perfect test for the Orion X7’s floating cutting plates. While I didn’t notice it initially, our yard now looks quite even, as if those small imperfections are no longer there. And even though much of our testing has happened at night (including map setup, no less), the Orion X7 is slowly optimizing the map and mowing better each time.

Just don’t expect this mower to be fast. You can change its mowing speed, but the default setting is best characterized as slow and methodical. You won’t set any land speed records with the Orion X7; in fact, its overall mow time might be as much as twice that of other robot mowers I’ve tested. But I don’t see this as a bad thing, and I think its slow working speed gives the cameras and AI more time to work, resulting in fewer mistakes and mishaps—of which there were very few.

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

If the Orion X7 didn’t have such a low profile, it likely would have been the first to climb my lawn’s steep side slope without getting stuck, thanks to its AWD capabilities. As it stands, it would need an inch or even two additional inches of ground clearance to climb it. But it came closer than any automatic robot mower (the manual remote-controlled Mowrator doesn’t count).

That said, the Orion X7 did stay on the grass medians at the edges of my yard. Rather than mowing in straight lines, it follows something of a zig-zag pattern when inside a narrow passage. To give the mower additional guidance, I used the app to place virtual walls at the curb. It has yet to fall off the edge after that.

Sunseeker’s problematic app

Most of my frustration with the Orion X7 stems from Sunseeker’s app. While it provides useful information—such as an estimate of the size of the working are, and the mower’s expected run time—the user interface is crowded with unnecessary information.

There also isn’t a lot of help when it comes to explaining the app’s various features, forcing you to refer to the user manual to figure out them out—and even that’s not as helpful as it should be when it comes to explaining the difference between no-go zones and virtual walls, for instance. I also had trouble figuring out how to get the mower to cut select zones at first. It seemed the mower wasn’t receiving my commands, because it would mow other zones anyway.

Scheduling mowing jobs is another aspect that could be more intuitive. Setting up zones that would be cut on different days required too much work and data entry, so I gave up and just put the mower in “auto” mode, where the robot itself chooses which zones to do and which order. Thanks to Sunseeker’s great AI, however, that seemed to work just as well anyway.

While Sunseeker gives you all kinds of customization options, even down to customized mowing instructions by zone, most of these are not explained in detail (if at all) so you don’t know what they mean or do. It also made it more difficult to review, as I am finding features after days of use, and probably will still find new things in the coming days and weeks.

While I can deal with the fact that the Sunseeker can’t climb our slope due to its design, these app problems are a real bummer. That said, none of the app problems are showstoppers.

Should you buy a Sunseeker Orion X7?

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

Ed Oswald/Foundry

The Orion X7 is new, so there were bound to be some problems; every robot mower I’ve tested to date has had one quirk or another. It’s not impossible to set up, you just need to have some patience. And with any luck, it’s a process you might need to do just once.

Problems of this nature are magnified at a mower at this price, because buying a higher-end robot mower brings higher expectations when it comes to babysitting the tool—and this toddler requires quality hands-on time at the outset. Every other element of the Sunseeker Orion X7—from its innovative floating cutting plates to its impressive AI and vision capabilities, which make it great for people who want to mow at night—is the best I’ve seen.

As it stands today, the Sunseeker Orion X7 isn’t the type of robot lawn mower that you can take out of the box and set it loose on your yard. But your patience will be rewarded once you get over that learning curve. This mower can go anywhere without your needing to worry it might get stuck or taking a trip down the street.

I’ll be watching for improvements in the app experience, which will make this mower even better.

Don’t miss our story that explains how robot lawn mowers navigate, and our in-depth reviews of some other highly rated robot lawn mowers, including the Dreame Roboticmower A1 and the Segway Navimow i110N.